Deep Fear
Deep Fear is a 1998 Survival Horror game for Sega Saturn, known for being the last Saturn game to reach Europe.
The player controls John Mayor from the ERS, a sort of civilian mercenary group specialised in rescues, stationed in the Big Table, an underwater army base. As the game begins, the submarine Sea Fox delivers to the base a capsule who recently fell out from space. Suddenly, the submarine inexplicably crashes, opening all his nuclear missiles hatches. John manages to go in the wreck and deactivate the hatches, but something came from the Sea Fox to the Big Table...
A Resident Evil knock-off who is surprisingly good. Even though it's too easy (there are many places where you can reload your weapons' ammo and health sprays as often as you wish) and isn't really scary, it has an excellent story and atmosphere, original gameplay ideas (being in an underwater base, you'll have to keep an eye on the oxygen levels of the zones and go through flooded rooms; you can also affect an item to the Z button, allowing you to use it without going through the menus), and the music is from Kenji Kawai.
- Anyone Can Die: And do they ever...
- Bittersweet Ending: John survives and puts a stop to the virus before it can spread to the rest of the planet... but fails to save any of the other characters.
- Body Horror: Oh so very much...
- Camp: Dubois Amalric.
- Dead Little Sister: Dead fiancee, actually.
- Do Not Run with a Gun: Averted. John can walk and run even with his gun ready to shoot. A great improvement over Resident Evil.
- Hollywood Science: The end cutscene is the most aggravating case, for we see John emerge from the escape pod into open air after spending the whole game in a deep-sea compound. In real life, he should have been taken to a decompression chamber, or the sudden change in air pressure would have killed him.
- Kill'Em All: John, Andrew the dolphin and Rambo the bulldog are the only survivors of the game's events.
- Load-Bearing Boss: THREE OF THEM!!
- One-Winged Angel: Gena's final mutation is that of a winged, green-skinned woman. Oh, and her voice echoes, and she glows so hard, she can blind you.
- Oxygen Meter: Each room holds a limited oxygen level represented by a time counter, which goes down faster if you use your weapons. You also have the rebreather, a tiny oxygen bottle you use in the rooms without air (time counter to zero, flooded, or filled with poison) which has a meter, making it a straighter example. Luckily, the save points allow you to reload the rebreather and all the rooms of the area you're currently in.
- Rescue Romance: Between John and Gena. Her mutating into a monster at the end of the game puts a bit of a halt to things though.
- Selective Gravity: In the flooded rooms, John and the monsters stay on floor, walk and run like if it was a normal situation (even though in the first flooded room you come across in the game, you see a corpse floating between two waters)!